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Comment on Is Antivirus needed in 2024?

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treadful@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Generally speaking, in reverse order of strength of argument:

Linux is built a little more securely. There’s a ton of caveats here but it is generally harder to privilege escalate. (inb4 someone sends me a list of escalation attacks)
The user base is generally more security conscious (i.e. doesn’t just run random executables)
Doesn’t have the same attack surface (like default exploitable services)
The ecosystem isn’t a monoculture so it’s harder to build one-size-fits-all malware
The market share is so low that it’s rarely ever a target of malware

Mostly it doesn’t make sense for attackers looking for low hanging fruit to attack Linux machines.

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uranibaba@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The last point is probably biggest point today. A hacker wants your money, and you as an individual do not have that much money. A company on the other hand, they can pay up big.

Since a lot of companies use Windows, they target that, because that is where the money is.

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- ramble81@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Except servers. They are very much an attack vector there.
  
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- fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Nonsense. Hackers get money these days by holding data to ransom.
  
  Not much data on personal computers.
  
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  - uranibaba@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s what I said.
    
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    fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Companies don’t store ransomable data on employee’s personal computers.
    
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agent_flounder@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think it is more about market share than anything. Viruses targeting the end user are, I think, fairly uncommon. But I don’t think remote and local exploits are particularly rare since Linux has massive server market share. I don’t have stats handy so maybe I’m full of it, idk.

I don’t think Windows has much in the way of default exploitable services anymore. Neither does Linux. I mean back around 2000 it was kind of a nightmare on both platforms. But default configs have gotten pretty good in 20+ years.

I’m not aware of a whole lot preventing various local privilege escalation attacks on Linux but maybe there have been developments in the last several years that I’m not aware of?

I know Windows 10 implements some additional memory protections for the LSA subsystem process to address Pass-The-Hash attacks.

Linux still has setuid/setgid executables as one vector. But I would imagine various forms of kernel exploits are more or less similar to both.

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